E44: Rebuilding 2026: Sunsetting Work That Doesn't Pay You Back

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In Episode 44, Lauryn and Joshua talk about a key lesson reinforced by Dan Martell’s coaching: when sales are going down and a product is consuming your time without paying you back, it’s time to sunset it—not emotionally, but strategically. They share real-life updates on family life, investing momentum, and what “rebuilding” looks like in 2026. Joshua breaks down a major strategic pivot inside Midnight30 Marketing: moving away from commodity orders (low-dollar, high-time) and doubling down on premium, service-based client gifting through a new brand—Impacked™.

 The conversation goes deep into raising minimums, learning to say no, automating repeat orders using AI, and building a scalable “client experience gift” system designed to boost retention for coaches, educators, and membership-based businesses.

They also share updates on:
• stabilizing their Texas apartment building with new property management
• a solar + roof program that drops insurance costs dramatically
• launching the Broke Millionaires Legacy Wealth Builder community

🔥 What You’ll Learn
• Why “selling commodities” becomes a race to the bottom—and how to escape it
• How to reframe an offer and charge more by adding a service layer
• The importance of sunsetting work that drains time and kills momentum
• Why $50, $500, and $50,000 orders can cost the same amount of time
• How Joshua plans to use AI automation to process repeat orders end-to-end
• The Impacked™ concept: premium gifts + automation + retention triggers (welcome / mid-year / renewal)
• Why premium items beat cheap swag (and actually stay in people’s lives)

🧠 Key Themes
• Momentum, positivity, and rebuilding as 2026 focus words
• Letting go of “yes to everything” and protecting time with minimums
• Shifting from transactional orders to a retention-based program
• Building a business model that supports family life (not 80-hour weeks)

🧩 Mentioned in the Episode
• Dan Martell coaching framework: pivot + sunset declining offers
• Impacked™ (premium client experience gifting)
• Legacy Wealth Builder community + weekly calls + deeper coaching
• Automation using AI to reduce time spent on repeat orders
• Premium gifting for online coaches and educators 

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#BrokeMillionairesPodcast #BusinessPivot #EntrepreneurLife

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

A part of I mean Dan Dan Martell's one of his recent coaching calls, he talked about you know pivoting your business on something that's that's going down in sales and just cutting it off or sunsetting it and going with something new. So hearing that was kind of uh just reassuring because I was already kind of planning on doing this and already had the ball in motion to do this. And then after that, that call is like, okay, that like that is the right decision because if it's taking your time and not making you money or sales are going down, like don't waste your time with it. Like you need to sunset it and and go with what is gonna make more money. So for the long term of business, like this is this is the right decision and what needs to be done. Being able to reframe what you're selling and adding the service and being able to charge more for it because you're adding the service down. It's just kind of taking the same business industry and just reframing what I'm selling and making it more valuable and and you know becoming more valuable to my clients. Just learning to let go and and really just letting go of saying yes. I I say yes to to everything when it comes to business, and that's that's a problem. I say yes to those $50 orders when I really should just be saying in a nice way, take your business outside.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Here's a minimum.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

There's yeah, I'm probably gonna raise my minimums to to kind of do that in a nice-ish way.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Welcome back to The Broke Billionaires, where we document our daily struggles and building wealth while raising a young family. Join us as we talk creative wealth building for everyday people and couples that are struggling in a down economy. I'm Lauren.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

And I'm Joshua Masari, and we'll be your host.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Welcome back.

SPEAKER_02 1:46

Here we are once again, daytime again, getting kind of used to it.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

The kids are back at school, and I just, you know, my hat is off to anyone who is really excited to have their kids home for the holidays. I want to get to that point, but we're just not quite there yet. Let's we keep it real here, right? I'm not trying to We love our kids, we really love them. But just not all the time, or not having the time, of course, but they were a lot over the Christmas break.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

Yes. Well, we also have a kid that won't sleep anymore.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Two, but yeah, one one went backwards. So that's been a little rough. So something we haven't talked about yet is we always do words for the year, and we kind of talked through what our new words are for this year. Do you want to do yours first?

SPEAKER_02 2:35

Yeah, so last year mine was harvest. That didn't work out. We were still just sewing, and so we'll get to that eventually. But my focus this year is gonna be momentum, like getting going in the right direction in our businesses and our investments and just getting everything going in the right. I feel like things have been going stale for quite some time or backwards and you know, forward and then backwards, forwards and backwards. I just want to get momentum moving forward in the right direction on everything. So that's my goal and my word for 2026.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

I was talking to my mentor mom about some of this stuff, and she said, You are definitely in a pruning season. I could not agree more with that. Feels like it's been a long pruning season. But I feel like that's kind of where we were at. My word for last year was abundance, which could have worked out if depending on how you're looking at it, positively or negatively.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

We well, wealth-wise, we we increased our wealth last year.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

Yeah, that's true. So it didn't it absolutely worked. My word for this year is positivity because I definitely need to work on having a more positive outlook on our situation and what we're doing, and then also rebuild and just remembering that this is our year to that we are really rebuilding. We have a really solid plan in place. We beforehand, we were just kind of trying to figure it out.

SPEAKER_02 3:55

Yeah, and this is this is kind of with our investments, real estate investing, uh, the business, and just kind of everything is rebuilding, also getting ready to rebuild a house. Like we've just we've got a lot of rebuilding projects that we're working on right now.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Yeah. Is it weird that I'm antsy to like have the itch to rebuild a house? I know I mean, yeah, I kind of do actually. I'm like ready to do it again.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

Because when we were done with the last one, you were like done. You're like, I don't want to do this, think about another house right now.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

I know, but the last time we had rolled straight into the house previously, like there was no break. It was just like one constantly. I'm not ready for you to physically do the rebuild again, like lose you on the weekends and things, but I'm like that creativity and that design side of me. I'm like getting the itch to create in that sense. But it's fun. So, yes, our our year of rebuilding. Um, we had our first interview of the year, which was fun. I'm excited for that to come out.

SPEAKER_02 4:50

Yeah, we've got a bunch more lined up. We're excited. We've got a lot of interviews that were scheduled and and getting ready to do.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

So you're going on interviews? I've been on several interviews.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

I should say. Yeah, I don't think anything's launched yet, but I think this month they should start start launching so or dropping. So excited for those. And then we got uh one of our projects houses locally here. We talked uh a few episodes back about needing a roof and the whole insurance situation where the insurance company wouldn't renew because of the the type of roof that was on it. And so now we're getting close to uh getting a new roof put on through the solar program. So it's getting solar and a new roof. And so we're very excited about that. It'll lower our insurance cost about $10,000 per year, actually, more than that. We were paying $2,500 and now we're paying $14,000 or something stupid. So it'll it's ridiculous. So that will the monthly cost for this program is gonna be about the same or less than what our current electric bill is, and it locks in that payment for the whole duration of the loan. I think it's 20 years. And I think there's a little bit of a writer, but it's like very minimal compared to what power goes up. But our insurance costs are gonna lower about a thousand dollars per month. So the amount of money that we'll save just in the insurance costs is like crazy.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

That's huge. Yeah, yeah. That's really I didn't know it locked in. That's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_02 6:19

Yeah, it doesn't lock, it has a has an escalator, so it does go up uh after the first five years or something like that. Starts going up three percent per year, but power goes up even more than that. So yeah, overall it's gonna save us a ton of money just on the insurance alone. So very excited about that. Also excited about the apartment building. We've been making progress on that in Texas. We talked a few months ago or recently about a switch with the property management we did, and it's working out really well. New property management has just been killing it with placements and managing the property, and so very excited about that. Um, we don't have any vacant units right now that there's a couple that are down, but they're being worked on. But uh, as of the units that are ready to rent, they're renting stuff right away. So getting momentum going in the right direction on that. So that's nice because that's been uh going backwards for quite some time and just a lot of expenses, a lot of things that need to be redone. Um, you know, fit, you know, cycling through tenants that were not good for the property to be there, getting better tenants in place, and it's been a bit of a challenge turning that property around. But we're we're getting getting close to going in the right direction with everything and getting the property value up and having it cash flow nicely and covering all of its cost basis. So excited about that.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Momentum, positivity, and rebuilding. Yes. Look, it's already it's all them together. I don't know if I told you this, but there was a fun little update with our oldest son. Um, we were talking a while back about a friend who sells he sells mortgages, and it randomly popped into his head yesterday. We were in the car, and he was like, Mommy, what's a mortgage? And it was so cute. So I was like, Oh, he's like, I love that he's asking this. So I was trying to explain to him how loans work and how the bank loans you money, and just you know, explaining that, you know, when you go to buy a house, you don't always have all that cash with you, so you have to have a loan. And he was like, Well, I have three dollars. Just cute.

SPEAKER_02 8:10

Probably need a little more than three dollars to leverage, at least on a house around here, but he's starting to get the concept.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

He's starting to get the concept, but he's asking like like really good questions, I feel like for a five-year-old to just ask about that and kind of keep going was kind of cool.

SPEAKER_02 8:23

So And they already know about the renovations that we do and we rent these houses out. You know, they go, they go with us to check on properties and do turnovers and see the house that they used to live in. And we were we were ch doing uh changing a light bulb at one of the apartments the other day, or uh, or uh what we have as an apartment above a garage, like a um a studio, and this used to be their nursery. So this is the first time they'd been back in their nursery, and there's someone living there, and it's uh, you know, I got a living room now and got it kind of set up as a little studio apartment.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Did they recognize it?

SPEAKER_02 8:58

Yeah, they did, but they were just like, Oh, there's this now, there's that now. Like it's a different bed. This is not my crib.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Like it was just kind of what did they say about the bathroom? Because there was no shower in there when Oh, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 9:08

They don't see it. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

Oh, they would have been probably really excited about that.

SPEAKER_02 9:12

Yeah, I'll have to show them when it's empty. Yeah. I didn't want to pry too much because the person was actually there. So yeah. Um, yeah, so what else?

SPEAKER_01 9:20

Uh so we are getting very close to finally launching our community, which we're super excited about. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_02 9:28

Yeah, so it's gonna be the Broke Millionaires Legacy Wealth Builder. Um, we're gonna be launching this really soon. Right now, we're starting to do pre-sales on the membership. And what this is gonna be is gonna be a community with a lot of like-minded people in similar situations, you know, in terms of like a family. You got a small family that you're you're raising or starting out. Maybe you're an entrepreneur, or maybe you are working a corporate job, but you're looking at investing and just trying to figure out where to put your money, like how to how to invest in, you know, whether it's real estate or other alternative investments, not just putting it in the stock market and your your company's 401k. So we'll be going over how to do self-directed IRAs and and solo 401ks for people that want to really take their retirement to the next level, a lot of creative tax planning. We do a lot of that. So uh for business owners and for high-income earners, that you know, things that you can do to offset some of that income and just different strategies and things that we do that we've you know been using for several years to build wealth. So just passing that information along, but kind of a lot of the stuff that we talk about on the podcast, but going a lot deeper into these different topics and then doing like one-on-ones and allowing people to ask questions during during calls. We'll do a weekly call uh and then we'll have breakout sessions where we do one-on-ones with people and just you know, how do you implement this into your situation in your life? So we're really excited. We've already been kind of doing that with with um people that we know or people that have reached out to us, and so we're just kind of bringing this all together in a community and gonna be able to help people do, you know, learn how to build wealth and where to put their money because we get a lot of questions on people that don't know you know that's their their first investment or whatever, and you know, they get burned and they they end up trying to go into uh an investment that they lose money on. So we've got the experience to be able to help people walk through that and make sure that they're not losing money and actually building wealth and getting momentum going in the right direction.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Yeah, we do. We get those questions a lot, and so we figured let's create a space where people can be all together and like you said, in community with one another. And obviously it will be people like different backgrounds and not everyone is, you know, necessarily rebuilding houses and doing our same strategy, but different strategies, and I think all kind of working together and just having a community, like you said, of like-minded people. Our hope is that it's family focused as well, and it's you know, we can help people kind of that might be scared to step into this phase of life with a young family, like know that they can do it.

SPEAKER_02 11:54

And yeah, we do things to the extreme. So if we can do it to the extreme, you can do a little less extreme and be a lot more comfortable. But I mean, the the fact that we do this with houses uh, you know, we buy an investment property, but we buy it as a primary residence, move into it, fix it up, and then move out and start running it right away. We we don't do it the easy way, but we've been able to build a pretty good amount of wealth in the last few years doing this. So it you know, it can be done with a family. So we just want to be able to give everybody the options and then also create a community where you know people can partner with each other. Um, so you're you've got like a trusted group of people that you can partner with and not just meeting random people that you don't know if you can trust them or not. Because a lot of people get burned by by partners as well.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Absolutely. So if you want more information about that, you can go to bmlegacywealthbuilder.com and we'll put that in the show notes as well.

SPEAKER_02 12:42

Yep, absolutely. You can go on there and check it out, get some info, and schedule a call, and we can kind of go a little uh deeper into what it's all about and answer any questions that you might have. Absolutely. Just a quick disclaimer the information shared on this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial, tax, or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making any financial decisions. Your individual circumstances may differ and require specific strategies not discussed here. Now let's get back to the show.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

So today we are talking a rebuild. Again, this is kind of our our word of the episode. Um, a rebuild of marketing company Midnight 30. And then this is, you know, for people who don't know, this is our main source of income.

SPEAKER_02 13:31

Has been. Has been so yeah, so Midnight Thirty is a uh print brokerage, and so we do printing, um, but we don't print anything in-house. We're just kind of a middleman, so we're basically in the service industry, really. But we do uh printing of commercial printing, so think like brochures, uh marketing material, business cards, pamphlets, catalogs, all those sort of things. Um, and then we also do like promotional products, so you know the mugs, we do apparel, uh, so any embroidery and screen printing. And about five, I would say about five years ago, yeah, like during actually during COVID, when COVID hit, um, and I've been doing this for like 15 years, and I I started my own company 2016, oh, almost 10 years ago. This will be the 10 year mark.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 14:18

Yeah, wow. So I've been doing this for about actually I've been doing this for almost 20 years. Oh my goodness. 20, so about 19 years I've been in the industry. I've been around it for a long time, and 10 years ago started my own company. And what I've noticed is that over the years it's gotten more and more competitive with online sellers. And it's and we sell really, we sell a commodity. Even though it's a customized, you know, it's all customized for each order for each client, it's still a commodity because there's so many people selling it and so many online resellers now. So what I'm looking to do is switch away from being such a commodity-based business because that's just you know a race to the bottom in terms of price and service, people don't really care about it as much anymore. It's all about online. I do have clients that will go somewhere else because they get a better price, but then they'll come back to me and be like, Well, can you do the same price, but we want your service? I'm like, well, it doesn't really work that way. Because I originally said no, and then so then they'll come back and they'll pay a little more to get the service. And so there are still people that appreciate that service. But overall, it's just it's a really hard business to be in because you're selling the same thing as everybody else. So it's hard to differentiate yourself. Now, I've been able to do that with the service, but it has taken a lot of my time. And now with a family, I just don't have the time to do that. And as the business grows, it's it's really hard for me to be able to give everybody the same amount of attention. So it's created a little bit of a bottleneck. Um, about two, about three years ago, I would say end of 2022, the business kind of hit its its peak on revenue on what I was able to do myself. And there's been some pullback since then with the economy. You know, sales were down, clients weren't spending money on things that they were spending on. And so now that it's starting to kind of build back up, what I'm looking at now, now I'm I'm hitting running into cash flow constraints because this is a very capital intensive business. The way it works is we fund the jobs for clients. You know, they they order whatever they're the an order of pens, let's say, and if it costs $100 for this order that we charge the client, you know, we may pay $70, $70 to get that order done. And so there's a markup, obviously, that we're making, but we're fronting the money on the front end. And then after the job ships, most clients get invoiced and they have terms. Um, not everybody has terms, but the larger clients do. And so then, you know, we don't get paid for another 30 days or so. And and so there's a lot of capital that's being put out there that we're having to front. And right now there's a constraint in the marketplace, like a lot of clients are not paying on time, or there's just certain situations where it's that capital is staying out longer than it normally does. So it's, you know, we've got a lot of inventory that we've we've financed for clients that's that's sitting longer than it normally does. So it's created a lot of cash flow constraints. And what I found was during COVID, everyone was working from home. And so all the stuff that clients were doing for their employees, they weren't able to hand it out to them anymore. So we started doing a lot of kidding. It was uh like uh corporate gifting where we do this box with different swag items for the employees, you know, a sweatshirt, a hat, and you know, a power bank, whatever. It was all these little things, and it would go out to the employees with little, hey, thank you for your service this year, or we'd do like award ones, like thanks for your one year of service, three year service, yada yada. And so we started doing a lot of that for a lot of our clients. But then in 2022, that kind of dried up for the most part. Marketing budgets froze. A lot of clients were just in their own cash flow issues and trying to hang on. So with that kind of like decreasing and now, you know, being kind of flatlined for a couple of years, now it's starting to build back up. What I'm looking to do is not focus so much on just selling a commodity like we were and trying to get more into a service product. And what I mean by that is still selling a commodity, but doing like these kits, these corporate gifting kits that that we send out to people, because there's a lot more service costs in that, and then we're able to charge for the service, plus the the the commodities that go in there. So instead of somebody ordering mugs and we just ship it to the the mugs to the client directly and they hand them out, we're putting it all together in a nice presentation box, sending it out to to their employees or whoever.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

And these can be fully like customizable, right? In terms of like the types of products for your specific client and like what exactly you're sending out.

SPEAKER_02 18:51

Yeah. So everything's fully customizable. So all the the items that go into it have you know the company logo on it, the actual packaging is customized. So you can do there's different lots of different options, but it's actual custom, customized packaging. So we've done this for a lot of smaller clients all the way up to like Google's, some of the companies that Google owns, um, and where we send out a customized box. It's kind of cool because you get it and you get it delivered to your house and it's this customized box for your company. You open it up and it's got all this swag inside. So we're kind of moving more towards focusing on that. And what we're really doing at this point is kind of rebranding. So Midnight 30 is still the main company, but we're we're launching another brand called Impact, and it's spelled I-M-P-A-C-K-E-D. So, like it's a it's a product that makes an impact when you send it out, but it's packed in the package, so it's kind of like a play on words there. But what we're gonna be focusing on is more premium gifting, and so it's gonna be more of a luxurious type of packaging that these go out in. It's gonna be more premium type gifts. So really start just focusing on a more higher-end uh name brand, more expensive stuff. So instead of sending a bunch of little thing, giveaway things, you're just doing one or two gifts that are a lot nicer and something that people are gonna actually hang on to and use long term.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

I love that because no one wants a bunch of random stuff. But if you're getting like a good quality piece, like a nice Stanley water bottle or you know, something like that that you can actually use it is something daily, I think that that's amazing. I love this this rebrand, rebuild rebrand. It's kind of like a rebrand.

SPEAKER_02 20:26

So you mentioned uh the Stanley water bottle, so that's one of the things like you know, there's all these knockoffs that you know might cost $10 to $15 for a look-like item. But if somebody's got that and they got the Stanley at home, which one are they gonna use?

SPEAKER_01 20:38

The Stanley, because I have the knockoff ones and I don't use them.

SPEAKER_02 20:41

Yeah, exactly. So that's what we're gonna be focusing on is hey, instead of doing the $15 one, get the actual Stanley and not do all the other items that you're doing, just get the Stanley one, just get that one nice item that that people are gonna appreciate. And and our real focus is gonna be um, you know, the clients uh we've got a lot of corporate clients traditionally that we that we've worked with. Uh, there's a lot of uh fintech companies that that I I work with. But this new brand is gonna be focusing more on like coaches and educators, especially with like an online offer that they're that they're doing where they've got either like a school community or some sort of coaching that they're doing where it's not physical, it's it's it's like an online type of program. So when they have somebody that you know signs up for the program, a box goes out to them with a kind of a welcome kit with a nice premium gift that's branded for their program. And then they'll get, you know, this whole brief brand is kind of focused around those type of companies. So you're gonna be getting, you know, a welcome gift, you'll get something kind of halfway through the year, and then towards the end, it'll be another one when it's time to renew. So the idea is that we're gonna be that that we're gonna be doing it's kind of like a marketing thing plus doing the printing, but it's really gonna be to drive uh renewal rates for these these clients.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

I was gonna say it sounds like you know, retention, really trying to ensure that they're holding on to their client.

SPEAKER_02 22:04

Yeah, the whole idea is just just helping helping these customers uh, you know, decrease or increase their their retention rate and getting higher renewals. So it's a lot cheaper for um for companies or or creators or or educators, it's a lot cheaper for them to retain their existing members and get them to renew than it is to acquire new property or acquire new clients. So the marketing is a lot more expensive that way. And if you can increase your retention rate, it's just a lot more cost effective to build your business.

SPEAKER_01 22:40

That makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 22:41

So that's what we'll be focusing on. But yeah, so we're we're gonna be, you know, we're kind of in the middle right now of this transition. We've been, we talked a little bit about the AI uh recently that we we started implementing, but basically implementing AI into the business to handle all the existing business, all